It cannot be lost on anyone in the Cuban government that the Trump administration used a federal indictment against Nicolás Maduro, the authoritarian leader of Venezuela, as the pretext for a raid to swoop into Caracas in January and seize him.
Whether the U.S. military is moving toward a similar raid in Cuba is not known, though an operation is probably not imminent. A large number of American Special Operations Forces are deployed in the Middle East, in case hostilities against Iran flare again.
But other people briefed on the administration’s thinking say that senior officials at least want the option of running the Venezuela playbook again.
While the war in Iran has staggered to an unsatisfactory stalemate, the military operation in Venezuela remains in President Trump’s view an unalloyed success.
Others close to the Trump administration believe that even if such an option is never approved, the threat of the United States trying to seize Mr. Castro, one of the leaders of the Cuban Revolution, will pressure the Cuban government to give in to the U.S. demands. But experts say that may be a misreading of the Cuban government.
“The indictment is one more element in the pressure campaign Trump and Rubio are using to try to force the Cuban government to surrender to U.S. terms at the bargaining table by creating this threat of military action in the hope that it will force the Cubans to back down,” said William LeoGrande, a professor of government at American University. “But the Cubans are not good at backing down.”
Mr. Ratcliffe’s precise message on Thursday to Mr. Castro’s grandson, Raúl G. Rodríguez Castro, known as “Raulito” or “El Cangrejo” (the Crab), is not known. But one demand was clear: Shut down China’s and Russia’s intelligence stations on the island, which the two countries use to intercept U.S. communications.
Exactly what else the administration wants from the Cuban government is less clear. But the primary goal of Mr. Trump and Marco Rubio, the secretary of state and national security adviser, is unambiguous. They want to be able to assert that the United States ended communist control of Cuba, but not push the country into complete chaos.
While C.I.A. directors are often tasked with secret diplomatic missions, the very public nature of Mr. Ratcliffe’s visit — complete with photographs and accounts of his message to the Cubans — was a departure. Frank O. Mora, the former ambassador to the Organization of American States and a former senior defense official, said the visit was a way to send an ultimatum to the Cuban government.
“The president is frustrated that he is not getting the results he wanted, or maybe he was promised in Cuba,” said Mr. Mora, who is now a professor at Florida International University. “They are tightening the screws to try to push the Cubans to make concessions they have been unwilling to do.”
While technically out of power, the elder Mr. Castro remains one of the most influential voices in Cuban politics. The state of his health is not completely understood, but he is frail, and has poor hearing and difficulty speaking. He has not made public remarks for some time. The optics of having an elite military special operations team seize a nonagenarian are likely to be poor, but that may not matter to the White House.
Mr. Mora said it was unlikely that the United States would try the same kind of military operation against Mr. Castro as it did with Mr. Maduro. But the indictment, he said, is a kind of “psychological operation.” Threats of a military operation or a legal indictment probably will not intimidate Mr. Castro, but they could send a message to the Cuban government, and to the Cuban American community in Miami, that has long pushed for an end to Communism on the island.
“The indictment’s more about trying to either instill fear to intimidate the regime and to make it seem, particularly in Miami, that the president is serious about changing Cuba,” Mr. Mora said.
Prosecutors are still discussing the scope of the possible indictment. Like the indictment against Mr. Maduro, it could include charges connected to drug trafficking. The indictment could also revolve around charges related to Cuba’s downing in February 1996 of planes run by the humanitarian aid group Brothers to the Rescue.
In a Feb. 13 letter to Mr. Trump, four Republican members of Congress requested that the Justice Department consider indicting the elder Mr. Castro, who served as Cuba’s defense minister at the time of the attack. The letter cited news reports indicating that Raul Castro approved the shoot-downs, which the members called “coldblooded murders.”
“We believe unequivocally that Raúl Castro is responsible for this heinous crime,” the lawmakers wrote. “It is time for him to be brought to justice.”
The episode hardened the U.S. stance toward Havana in lasting ways. President Bill Clinton, who had hoped to liberalize relations with Havana, called the downings “an appalling reminder of the nature of the Cuban regime — repressive, violent, scornful of international law.”
Four men were killed when a Cuban Air Force MiG fighter jet shot down two single-propeller Cessna aircraft over the Straits of Florida in 1996. Three were U.S. citizens and one a legal permanent U.S. resident. The planes were operated by Brothers to the Rescue, a Miami-based Cuban exile group founded several years earlier to assist Cuban refugees and support the Castro regime’s overthrow.
The group said the planes were on a humanitarian mission in search of Cuban refugees en route to Florida by raft who might have needed assistance. Cuba insisted the planes had violated its airspace, a claim disputed by international aviation authorities. But after the group dropped anti-regime pamphlets over the island during earlier missions, Cuba had threatened to use force against the flights.
The downing enraged Cuban exiles in Miami, and loudly resonated in Washington. Within days, Congress passed long-stalled legislation known as the Helms-Burton Act, perhaps its toughest action against Cuba. Among other things, the act conditioned the removal of U.S. sanctions on the fall of the Castro regime and gave new rights to Americans and Cuban Americans with claims to Cuban property seized after the 1959 victory in the country’s revolution.
Mr. Clinton’s opposition to the act vanished overnight, and he signed it into law on March 12, 1996. That remains a date of infamy in Havana: This year, on the 30th anniversary of the law’s signing, President Miguel Díaz-Canel denounced it on social media as a monstrosity.
David C. Adams in Florida contributed reporting.
